What Is Search Engine Marketing - SEM?

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, means that you are engaged in marketing strategies and techniques that will ensure your website shows up in the search engine results when visitors type in keywords that will lead them to your site.

There are two distinct types of SEM and we'll briefly look at both of them.

• SEO - Search Engine Optimization
• PPC - Pay Per Click

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

Even if you're a beginning Internet marketer, you are, no doubt, familiar with SEO or Search Engine Optimization. In order for your website to be listed anywhere near the top of the search engine results for your niche, you'll need to optimize your site for the search engines.

So how do you accomplish this?

You can pay someone to do this for you or you can do it yourself. Keep in mind, though, that even if you pay someone to optimize your website for the search engines, that you'll still need to update it regularly because stale content doesn't usually rate very high in search engine results.

There is a lot you can do to optimize your website for the search engines. You'll need to pay close attention to the careful placement of your chosen keywords, they'll need to be placed throughout your site in the content, titles, and also in the Meta tags.

You'll also need to have relevant incoming links pointing to your web site. By far, however, the most important thing you can do to optimize your website for the search engines is to create a genuinely informative and helpful user experience. This means that when visitors land on your site that they will find information and content that is useful to them and relevant to their search.

It won't do you any good to drive traffic to your website if there isn't something to keep that traffic at your site once they arrive. This means you must be constantly updating your website and anticipating and fulfilling the needs of your visitors, which you hope to turn into customers.

While search engine algorithms constantly change and you'll never be able to anticipate exactly what it is the search engines are looking for, you can and must anticipate the needs of your customers and then make sure you have what they are looking for.

PPC - Pay Per Click

PPC, or Pay Per Click is the other kind of Search Engine Marketing you may want to consider. While SEO is absolutely essential to any Internet marketer's website, PPC is completely optional.

Some Internet marketers use it and some don't. You may find other forms of advertising more to your liking or you may decide this is, indeed, the way you want to go.

If you've ever done a Google search, you have most likely spotted the sponsored ads, these are the ones to the right and on top of the regular, or organic search results.

Advertisers have paid for these ads to appear and the higher up they appear, the more money they cost. Advertisers only pay when these ads are clicked on, which is why this form of advertising is called pay per click.

While a click doesn't guarantee a sale, for the most part, when someone clicks on your ad it is because they are interested in what you are selling. For this reason, it is important to select and test different PPC strategies in order to actually produce profitable campaigns.

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